Wikipedia has an excellent list of old games that have been released as freeware by their publishers/developers -
[url=]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_games_released_as_freeware[/url]
These are games that were once commercial and are now free to download. Anyone know of any that are missing? Post them here!
There are quite a few gems on that massive list.

[url=]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_games_released_as_freeware[/url]
Sweet! I didn't know Abuse was freeware.

Abuse is free for a veeery long time I think... And I'm not mentioning free remake :D

Also MechCommander series is free. Go to http://www.mechcommander.org/ for downloads.

Is this legal? I was at the site and wanted to download MechCommander 2. They only have a torrent, which in itself isn't a bad thing - but the torrent comes from a site called "thepiratebay.org", which made me suspicious.

There are some legit torrents on thepiratebay. I wouldn't go there during work, but the site just hosts the torrent files. And yes, I think that the Mechcommander series has been properly released to the public. If you happen to have VC++ 2005 handy you can actually grab the code and resources and build your own version.

http://liberatedgames.com/
It may not be updated too often, but they track old releases and their status fairly well. Various licenses around, sometimes it's only the source code.

Awesome! I am so downloading some of those.
Psychonauts is free?!?!?! *runs to download*

Nice to see people keeping it legit, and not falling back on the myth of 'abandonware.' Thanks for the links!

Yes, this is legal. Read this article: http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2006/8/31/5172

Nice thread, some great games in the list.
MechCommander.org had direct downloads for both MechCommander games before, guess it was hogging too much bandwidth and they had to take it down.
If any of you guys like those old-school Apogee platformers, try Bio Menace. It's like the granddaddy of platformers, CGA graphics, PC Speaker audio, Good gameplay.

Bio Menace was EGA, not CGA.
I love that I still remember that stuff.

No it's on gametap. I believe it's one of the games you can play without subscribing (until Dec 2008). Also might I suggest buying it? Double Fine really deserves money for their excellent work :(

That's what I meant. Aren't they getting money from having it on GameTap?

bump-o for newb-o